Taking Lyndon Seriously

Isn't it about time that misguided liberals take Lyndon Johnson down off the cross? I mean, seriously, the guy's been dead since 1973. Can he stop being a punching bag now?

I haven't seen Selma yet, so I won't pass judgment on the quality of the film, but the defense that the director has mounted against the criticism of her portrayal of LBJ does not fill me with a great deal of hope.

I can argue, Notion that Selma was LBJ's idea is jaw dropping and offensive to SNCC, SCLC and black citizens who made it so...Bottom line is folks should interrogate history. Don't take my word for it or LBJ rep's word for it. Let it come alive for yourself.

First of all, I have no idea how I should "interrogate history." Maybe I could strap Clio, Muse of History, to the old waterboard and see what happens. But, alas for Ms. DuVernay, the rest of this is all my bollocks. You can dramatize history until it whistles a happy tune, but you simply cannot have a film in which Custer was killed by Vikings.

The retroactive use in history of the Civil Rights Movement as a salve for guilty white consciences, and the use of Dr. King as such, always has rubbed me wrong. (And that's not even to get into the criminal misuse of his "content of their character" trope by people who would have been on the wrong side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.) And it would be altogether improper to use this controversy to deflect from the story the movie is trying to tell, which is certainly relevant to what's happening in the streets today, and in the nation's courtrooms as well, now that John Roberts has declared the Day Of Jubilee. But that doesn't excuse transparent flummery. Ms. DuVernay's problem is not with Joseph Califano. Her problem is with history which, if you interrogate it properly, reveals that her real problem is not with Califano, but with Martin Luther King and with Lyndon Johnson.

There are White House tapes, recorded in real time, that show King and Johnson working side-by-side to strategize the creation of public support for a Voting Rights Act. It is true that, having just wrangled the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, Johnson wanted a breather before taking on voting rights. But, as soon as it became clear that King was not inclined to wait, Johnson, for whom the ballot was positively totemic, got on board with both big feet. This is clear froma fascinating tape from January 15, 1965in which you can see King and Johnson, master politicians both, fencing with each other until Johnson offers the clearest statement he can on his support for voting rights -- and admits, tacitly, he can see the political power of what King was doing in the street.

President Johnson: --that if you just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn't true, why, people accept it. Well, now, this is true, and if you can find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or South Carolina, where--well, I think one of the worst I ever heard of is the president of the school at Tuskegee or the head of the government department there or something being denied the right to a cast a vote. And if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio and get it on television and get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it every place you can, pretty soon the fellow that didn't do anything but follow--drive a tractor, he's say, "Well, that's not right. That's not fair."

King: Yes.

President Johnson: And then that will help us on what we're going to shove through in the end.

King: Yes. You're exactly right about that.

(By the way, the essential history of the relationship between the two men can be found in Nick Kotz's brilliant Judgment Days.)

King found the worst condition he could find in Alabama, and god knows he got it on the radio and he got it on the television. And what he and the rest of those marchers bought with their blood -- and, in the case of James Reeb, with his life -- was their own triumph. But the history of the country to that point was replete with civil rights triumphs that dissolved in the face of entrenched hatred. What happened next was that, this time, the president of the United States got up in front of the Congress andgave the greatest speech given by a president in my lifetime.

Go see the movie. At the very least, we can all get a sense of everything we've lost over the past few years.

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